Event description
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While enormous strides have been made in shifting public narratives around fair taxation and in establishing key policy measures on the global agenda, the international framework for tax remains fundamentally flawed. The sustained influence of elites and their professional enablers has left national governments unable to deliver progressive taxation to support broad-based human well-being, and to underpin the social contract. Countries are on course to lose US$4.7 trillion in tax to tax havens over the next 10 years, starving countries of the resources to respond to crises of climate, inequality, inflation, conflict and more.
The escalation of the dual crisis of inequality and climate breakdown in particular demands a radical rethinking of what constitutes fair, transformative and effective eco-social policies. Two movements are increasingly realizing just how much they are aligned in pursuing these goals. Both the climate justice and the tax justice movements are progressive actors trying to redress deeply discriminatory practices and legacies that are being upheld by a minority at the expense of everyone else. There is no climate justice without economic justice.
We are now at a critical juncture for understanding and mobilizing the role of taxation for climate justice. And while the Paris agreement set emission targets without mentioning the role of fiscal policies, there is now increasing consensus that part of the missing climate finance gap should be sourced through targeted tax measures. The role of tax to fill some of the climate finance gap is finally being recognized.
Beyond those targeted taxes that can raise revenue, tax justice offers a holistic, systemic vision for how to reorganize parts of the global financial system that will yield critical climate justice outcomes. For example, ending financial secrecy and creating an enabling, not constraining, regulatory environment will allow winning positive climate outcomes. If we can’t tax the largest economic actors because we don’t know where their activity is, we cannot address negative externalities of their activities effectively. Systematically implementing Country by Country Reporting for multinationals would help realise undertaxed global multinational profits to become a sustainable revenue source.
At this event, we will discuss the power of fiscal policies for climate justice from different influencing vantage points. It will bring together experts and activists in the fields of inequality, climate and human rights to share their expertise and insights on why a progressive tax system is a necessary building block for a fair transition, and how to reduce inequality and protect vulnerable communities in the process.